How Evangelicalism Became Corrupted

19Aug

I am an evangelical Christian. I have been for 18 years. I have no plans on changing that.

But so much within American evangelicalism is so wrong… I sometimes wonder why I bother to keep the term. But the reason is simple — I am an evangelical and I am tired of the term getting hijacked. I guess I could abandon it, but I think it is better to redeem it.

Roger E. Olson has faced the same dilemma and is writing about it. Here is part of what he recently wrote on his blog:

My heart has grieved over what has happened to the evangelical movement. On the one side one finds popularizers peddling a “gospel” of health and wealth through positive thinking. On the other side one finds fundamentalists trying to exclude as non-evangelical everyone who doesn’t think just like them. The middle (which I think of as the historical evangelical position of tolerance of differences of opinion within a general embrace of historic Christian orthodoxy) is hard to inhabit. People there get shot at from both sides.